Early Stages of Persecution

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Early Stages of Persecution


  1. Nazi Party Platform
    1. Racial Hygiene
      • The Nazi party preformed two different hygienes, genetics and racial. Hygiene genetics is basically selective breeding of humans. The Nazi party made laws eliminated genes that would harm future generations. They outlawed homosexuality and abortion because the Nazis wanted to breed a "super breed". They also issued a sterilization program in which they would sterilize the gene pool of genetically damaged genes, such as schizophrenia, genetic blindness, genetic deafness, and deformity.

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  • While, racial hygiene is basically treating every race other than a certain one as a disease or sickness. In the early 1900s NazisBlood Protection Law, because the Nazi party wanted to protect the pure bred Germans from having offspring that made non-pure Germans. They wanted this because they believed that they were creating a “super breed” which was only accomplished by German blood.


    1. Eugenics
      • German eugenics did not come originally from Hitler, it originated from the United States of America decades ago. Eugenics is the science of improving a human population by mass control breeding, which was Hitler’s plan to create a “super breed”. The Nazis killed thousands for this cause. People would be sterilized to see if they are fit to be apart of this “super breed”, and if they weren’t, they were often killed. The Nazis believed that only blond, blue-eyed Nordic types were worthy enough of living. They considered everyone else as a “life unworthy of life”. In 1934, Germany was performing 5,000 plus sterilizations a month. They built institutes for German race biology, such as the Institute for Brain Research which was then made into a building for German race biology. Out of the thousands of Germans that were take from old age homes, mental institutions and other custodial facilities were gassed. Somewhere between 50,000 to 100,000 were killed.

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The white part of the circles is white blood and the black is Jewish blood. Only a full Aryan could marry a one-quarter Jew, otherwise it was not allowed. Someone was considered a Jew if they had at least two Jewish grandparents.

  1. Anti-Jewish Legislation
      • The Aryan mindset of Nazis led to the persecution of other races, especially Jews. Anti-Jewish legislation started under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler in 1933. The Nazis took away Jews' political, legal, and civil rights until 1939 when World War II began. No Jews were safe, because Hitler restricted their lives. Hitler got every German involved, so every German supported the idea of the persecution of the Jews.
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    1. "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service"
      • The Law for the Restoration of the professional Civil Service on April 7, 1933 was a way to limit the participation of Jews in German public life. This law was the start of of regulations used to exclude Jews from Germany. Laws restricted Jews to attend any German schools and Jewish doctors were restricted from operating on non-Jewish patients. Jewish lawyers were restricted from working on legal matters, which affected their professional life.
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In spite of that Neustadt am Aisch is full of signs such as “The Jews are our misfortune” and “Whoever buys from Jews is a traitor to the people”. The signs are even hung over streets. In addition, there have been about 60 popular meetings in recent weeks on the “Jewish Question”, where the speakers gave detailed accounts of cases of race defilement and the shameful acts of citizens who were still buying from Jews." Document 1: Letter of the Jewish firm Schwab 28 March 1934 To: The Ministry of Economics, Berlin

    1. Nuremburg Laws
      • As Anti-Jewish legislation progressed, Nazis developed the Nuremburg Laws in 1935 that not only identified Judaism as a religion but they also persecuted many people that identified themselves as German but came from Jewish descent. These laws deprived even German Jews of their rights of citizenship. The Nuremburg laws had two parts: "The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor" (regarding Jewish marriage) and "The Reich Citizenship Law" (designating Jews as subjects). The laws segregated Jews and eventually, Jewish people were stripped of their rights as human beings.

"And, of course, as a “religious” Jew, I hope that the Lord will help me when my own intelligence is inadequate. Therefore, from today on, everything I do will be directed towards this aim. Of course, I will continue to study the Bible, because only according to its spirit can Israel survive. In addition, I will learn as much as I can about Judaism and about my people." Diary Entry of Moshe Flinker, a Young Jewish Refugee in Belgium - December 8, 1942

  1. Pogroms
    • Pogroms are massive acts of violence against one particular group of people, religious, ethnic, or other, and usually a minority. They are usually the destruction of homes, businesses, and places of worship, but they can also entail physical violence and murders. Sometimes pogroms are started because of something else that happened or they are started spontaneously. There have been many pogroms against the Jews all over the world for centuries, Russia in late 1800 to early 1900s, Poland in 1918, Argentina in 1919, and Israel in 1945. However, some of the worst pogroms, against the Jews, were during the Holocaust. The Nazis destroyed many homes and businesses, burned synagogues, and killed thousands of Jews.

"I couldn't believe my eyes," said Segall-Blank, an endocrinologist who lives in Brookline, as she recalled being a child and seeing her synagogue burn. "I didn't understand that the fire was not an accident."

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  1. Kristallnacht
    • On November 7, 1938 a seven-year-old boy named Herschel went to the German Embassy in Paris with the intent to assassinate the German Ambassador for France. He had just learned that his family had been forced out of Germany and told external image broken-glass-6-2.gifto go to Poland. They had lost their house, store, and most of their possessions. When he got to the embassy he learned that the ambassador was not in, so he changed his plan and decided to shoot a lesser officer, Third Secretary Ernst vom Rath. Rath lived for two days after being shot, but died on November 9. This gave Hitler’s Chief of Propaganda, Goebbels, the excuse he needed to start pogroms against the Jewish. November 9, 1938 was when the first pogrom against the Jews, initiated by the Nazis, and it came to be called Kristallnacht, ‘The Night of Broken Glass’. Nazi youth burned Jewish synagogues, destroyed and looted Jew’s homes and stores. Jews were beaten and attacked, 91 were killed. 101 synagogues and 7,500 Jewish stores were destroyed. 26,000 were arrested and sent to concentration camps.



"We got to be about half a mile away and saw smoke and smelled smoke," Segall-Blank said. "I saw the Nazi boys in their brown shirts waving swastika flags and singing, 'Death to the Jews.' "


    • On November 12th, higher Nazi officers got together to discuss what had happened a few days earlier. Up to that point, the Nazi’s had been saying that they did not initiate Kristallnacht, but were not discouraging it either. The officers talked about two main topics: how to blame the Jews for what had happened and how to use the events that had happened to make a set of anti-Semitic laws, which would remove Jews from the German economy. They were mainly worried about the economy because the German insurance companies would have to pay for the damage done to the Jewish shops, which would lose the Germans a lot of money. After successfully blaming the Jews for the event they fined them one million marks for the assassination of Rath and six million marks from the insurance companies were to be put in a state account. One of the Nazi officers, Goering, also relayed to the group that Hitler had chosen the path to the ‘Final Solution’ and was already getting the bureaucratic procedures set up. This was the beginning of the Holocaust.

    1. Final Solution to the Jewish Question
        • The Final Solution was Nazi Germany's plan to execute the European Jews during World War II, ending in the final and most deadly phase of the Holocaust. Major killings of about one million took place. They sent Jews away, built concentration camps and killed them all. The plans of the Final Solution were fully implemented on July 19 1942. At first, Jews were deported as "undesirable aliens" or sent to the concentration camps, where they thought they were just going to stay for a while. In the so-called "Cristal Night", November 9, 1938, around 30,000 Jews were deported to concentration camps.

“In the early spring of 1941, after which Himmler sat at his desk with a very troubled look on his face, put his head in his hands and said: "My God, my God, what I am expected to do"
        • Terror against Jews was intended to accelerate their emigration and to take over the world. Four crematories and gas chambers were put in operation between March 22 and June 5, 1943. The biggest action happened between May 8 and July 29, 1944; it was to gas more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews on command. The war ended in the year of 1945.
      1. Wansee Conference
        • The Wansee conference took place on January 20, 1942 in Berlin. It consisted of 15 top Nazi Bureaucrats to coordinate the final solution in which the Nazis would attempt to kill off the entire Jewish population of Europe. The session lasted just 90 minutes. The “Wansee protocol” gave prosecutors a “smoking gun” linking the Nazi leadership to the “Final Solution” and the death camps where 6 million Jews died. At the Wansee Conference in January 1942, German government and SS leaders met to coordinate the extermination of every Jew in Europe. From then until the end of the war in 1945, the "Final Solution" was official Nazi policy and meant one thing only---death to the Jews.
  1. Bibliography